Can Michel Barnier save Emmanuel Macron?
The French president’s calculation may appease Marine Le Pen but it risks mutiny on the left.
ByEmmanuel Macron
At the age of 39, in 2017, Emmanuel Macron became the youngest president of the French Fifth Republic. He had only founded his centrist political party, En Marche, in April 2016. In April 2022 he won a second term as president of the EU’s second-largest economy, which no French president had achieved in 20 years. He studied at the prestigious Henri IV high school in Paris, and he studied philosophy and later attended the École Nationale d’Administration. Find our latest news and comment here.
The crisis of the two presidents
Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron have come to personify the chaos of the countries they seek to rule.
By
Inside Labour’s great European reset
Keir Starmer believes that his charm offensive will yield concrete results.
By
France’s Liz Truss moment is yet to come – and it may be worse
Fights over the budget and a growing debt problem promise a difficult autumn.
By
Can France’s anti-Le Pen alliance survive?
Political chaos, confusion and incompetence are almost inevitable after no single grouping wins a parliamentary majority.
By
The Macron era is over
The success of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France’s parliamentary elections has annihilated the president’s power base.
By
What the National Rally’s rise means for Labour
Keir Starmer and David Lammy may soon be faced with nationalist governments across the Atlantic and the Channel.
By
A staggering first-round victory for Marine Le Pen
Emmanuel Macron’s political gamble has backfired.
By
A reckoning for the Parisian elite
The French capital, once a seat of global power, has entered a new era of political and cultural upheaval.
By
The roar from below
How Emmanuel Macron turned France to the hard right.
By
Emmanuel Macron is gambling with France’s future – and Europe’s
The far right has his government under siege.
By
The West is revealing its hand to Putin
Emmanuel Macron’s threats to send ground troops to Ukraine only exposes Europe’s deepening divisions over the war.
By
The end of progressive Macronism
Macron is beginning to resemble the right-wing authoritarians who oppose him.
By
Emmanuel Macron does not understand France
A leading French thinker on the forces of a new movement that is neither left nor right.
By
France’s forces of law and disorder
French police have declared themselves “at war” with rioters. How did the state’s protectors become a threat to its future?
By
The rotten heart of the French republic
The crisis in France only benefits the hard right, who will exploit it to reshape French politics.
By
Is Emmanuel Macron scared of Europe?
The French president is increasingly adrift in a changing continent.
By
The French right can’t quit Russia
A former prime minister’s parliamentary testimony highlights persistent pro-Moscow sympathies among France’s elite.
By
Is Emmanuel Macron running out of options?
The French president is at risk of being remembered not as an ambitious reformer but as the leader who handed…
By
Emmanuel Macron’s appeasement tour is off to a rough start
As he visits the regions, can the French leader move on from the pension reform protests and relaunch his presidency?
By